


Coiling Wires

by thetalkingcrocus



Category: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Multi, Polyamory, Relationship Negotiations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-01
Updated: 2018-05-01
Packaged: 2019-04-30 17:59:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14502474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thetalkingcrocus/pseuds/thetalkingcrocus
Summary: "Born inside the gates of a familyHardened by a roman machineryCast among the building sites,The coiling wires, the shots collected" Shearwater, "Animal Life"





	Coiling Wires

**Author's Note:**

> Written as part of the 2014 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Summer Exchange, as a gift to Kay. Originally posted to my tumblr August 13 2014.

You didn’t think it could be fixed, but McMurphy had made things true that simply couldn’t be before. He’d done everything short of turning water into wine (and perhaps even that, depending on whether the technical or metaphorical definitions were used). He had raised legions of dead hearts to start beating again, and it only made sense that if anyone could mend the shards of the Hardings’ marriage, it was R.P. McMurphy.

He’d come to live with you, after. It was a  _conditional release_ , the hospital had said, and you didn’t care about the first word, only the second. In six months, the group of you would appeal to the ward for the same fate for Bromden, but for now McMurphy was inhabiting your home in the same way he’d filled the ward with his presence. When you woke up, his footsteps were already audible: he was trying to be quiet but he’d never been good at that. When you went to sleep- well, that had changed over the course of the time he’d been living with you.

He had looked at your relationship and appraised it and although he had affirmed, when he first met Vera and many times since, that he was not a marriage counselor, he was a repairer of things and a repairer of people and those two facts were unchangeable about him. He had watched you and he’d made a decision all by himself, with that small thoughtful smile that had far too few teeth to be up to anything fun or painless.

His solution was talking. And so you did. You sat down with Vera and McMurphy at your kitchen table, clutching coffee mugs like lifelines. Your poor old heart trembled in your chest but you met her eyes across the small table anyways, and she respected you for it and you gained insight and that was the important thing. She’d always been a pretty woman, but there was something more- of course there was, McMurphy had intoned when you voiced this to him privately. She was a human being. And she was very different from you. In all the places where you were nervous, shying away from contact, she was confident in her hand on McMurphy’s shoulder. In all the places you were predictable, routine-oriented, she was mysterious and you could never be sure and that was probably why you were so afraid of her, but it was getting better  _it was_. Not immediately. But it was.

McMurphy understood the both of you. He gave you time, and space, and he gave you his presence; dusty workboots kicked up on the kitchen table, but you kept having your conversations and little by little the walls came down, with the assistance of McMurphy there and maybe you still couldn’t confront her when the two of you were alone, but it was a hell of a lot better than nothing.

The apologies came with difficulty at first. You tripped over the word “sorry”, you nearly teared up, your hands got caught up in your wide web of words but McMurphy wouldn’t let you back out and it wasn’t even anything he said, he just stayed. McMurphy was an expert in Not Leaving. He placed a big red hand on top of your slim white one and something passed through you and you gave a little shiver of pleasure and finished your sentence and there you were, you and Vera talking and not fighting.

It went on that way for a myriad of days, weeks. It was two months before you began to be nervous, because you and Vera were friends now. Perhaps that wasn’t what husbands and wives were meant to be: god knows it wasn’t what your parents were, but you weren’t at each others throats anymore and it was then that the worry crept into your stomach and you began waking up early, always afraid that Vera would be gone and with him. She wasn’t, but you worried anyways: that now you weren’t McMurphy’s favorite anymore, you had transcended the realm of the ward where you were his beloved right hand man, his second-in-command bull goose loony.

Using your newly gained power of conversation, you woke early one morning, and padded down to the kitchen to put on coffee. You would never cook the way McMurphy could: with his whole being filling the kitchen with warmth, his clear tenor voice rising in some old folk song or another as he slapped his belly with one hand and flipped bacon in a pan in the other. But you could make coffee. You could do that. And so you did, and you set out his mug: white, ceramic, with a rooster painted on the side of it. Your mug was simpler, dating before your stint in the ward. It’s blue and chipped on the rim and you love it, and you wrap long slim fingers around it and wait for him to descend the stairs. You don’t have to wait long (you knew you wouldn’t have to). When he arrives, you hand him his cup of coffee and say your words, the ones that have been bouncing around the inside of your skull for weeks.

“I’m worried,” you start, hands folded in front of you, tensing and releasing as you struggle to keep your hands calm, to keep any part of you calm. “I’m worried, my friend, that you may not- er- that is to say… have you decided, since our time on the ward, that I am no longer as imp-“ you choke on the word and your hands burst free of their prison: your will is never enough to hold them still, “as important to you. As I once was.”

McMurphy watches you with steady eyes. You lean back against the counter. Your own mug sits untouched on the table, and he places his next to it. “Now, Per-fessor Harding. What would make you think a thing like that?”

“I am under the impression- just a sense, of course, you understand- that you are trying to patch Vera and I up so that you can leave. Leave us.” 

“Harding,” McMurphy says lowly and you want to call his tone tired but no, it’s something even rarer. Serious.

You can’t help yourself. You take a step forward, then two, then your hand is on his back (he’s warm  _my God_  is he warm) and your head is tilting up and you are kissing him. Full on the mouth. He is kissing back.

“That was- a mistake.” You say faintly. You don’t mean it and you know he knows that.

“You know,” he says, thoughtful smile on his face, “I don’t think it was.” His face morphs, changes, flashes a broad white grin and claps a large hand on your shoulder and you feel as though you’re in a spotlight made of affection and everything, strangely enough, seems alright.

You have another talk with Vera that day, once she’s woken up and come down to join you and McMurphy and it is not an easy one. 

(None of them really have been)

But here it is. Here it is, your shiny-new friendship with your wife on the line and McMurphy is conducting what he calls a “scientific experiment” (you protest that as the Professor, you really should be the one conducting experiments).

“I have a proposition to make,” he says, eyeing you, daring you to question this new word. You swallow, hard, and meet Vera’s eyes across the table. She flicks up a thin eyebrow and you give a nervous smile and- there we are. She smiles back.

McMurphy’s proposition involves asking “May I?” like a Southern gentleman and then leaning across the table to kiss both of you in turn after you give a shaky nod and Vera smiles with a demure “You may.”

And then it is your turn and you are kissing your wife on the lips and her lips taste of peppermint and you are confused but not in the worst of ways. McMurphy seems content to not talk anymore, but this is different now. This needs clarification. Needs rules. You need rules.

And so you go to light a cigarette but can’t because your hands are shaking. McMurphy lights it for you. You pass it to Vera and hand him another to light and then you’re smoking and talking and it’s three pairs of viper-eyes in the coils of smoke and a matching coil in your stomach: you’re nervous with the feeling that things might be okay.

And they are.

It takes a while, but they are.

You fit together clumsily at first. McMurphy steadies the both of you- lord knows you, in particular, need it. He keeps a hand planted on your arm, the smooth plane of your chest, the arching bone of your hip. Vera touches you too, of course: she always makes eye contact now, always smiles softly, all the sharp edge isn’t turned towards you anymore and there you are. It’s new and exciting: the brush of McMurphy’s stubble across your stomach, the sly smile on Vera’s inviting lips and the first time they, together, make you come, you lose track of whose hands are where, you’re so lost in the bizarre improbable pleasure of it all. 

You nestle up like baby birds at night, and you wake to your hand on Vera’s thigh, McMurphy’s leg slung restlessly over yours and it comes to you then.

You were never shattered. Or if you were, you had lost a little piece- ground up to dust in the silence of two people who were afraid of what they meant to each other. You weren’t something that could be shattered and put back together, not without something to fill in the missing pieces and McMurphy was that something but no- that analogy isn’t quite right.

You know it doesn’t fit because you don’t feel fragile while Mack’s lips are on yours, while Vera mouths at your neck, your jaw. You don’t feel like porcelain, or like glass. You feel like something electric, as though there are coiled wires passing currents between all of you. Conductivity demands something to fill the empty space, for the current to be passed through. Fate delivered you McMurphy, healer of the broken, fixer of all things.

You don’t think he meant to stay at first.

You share a conniving smile with Vera past his broad, bare chest.

A spark flickers.

You rest a pale hand on his thigh and Vera does the same. A mirror image. You know he’s staying now. 


End file.
